benno

yes me neither - but I gave up and decided to get a cheap one from a computer market. The alternative is to create a custom loader, but I didn't want to do that - read don't know how! I hope this makes sense, I've had hardly any sleep due to my day (?) job!! - but that is another story. I have just finished an install. o GigaByte GA-8S655TX motherboard. With SiS964 RAID controller. This is what I did: 1) found cashpoint machine, got money. Visited computer market, bought cheapest and smallest disk I could find (40g!) 2) stuff around with my bios - putting it in a more failsafe mode 3) install OS! 4) stuff around again with kernel parms (acpi=no noapic nolapic) 5) download kernel linux-2.6.5-rc2.tar.bz2 from kernel.org 6) download kernel patch patch-2.6.5-rc2-bk3.bz2 from kernel.org 7) download libata kernel patch 2.6.5-rc2-bk3-libata1.patch.bz2 from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/peo.../jgarzik/libata 8) unpack kernel and patch... cd /usr/src bunzip2 --stdout linux-2.6.5-rc2.tar.bz2 | tar xf - cd linux-2.6.5-rc2 bunzip2 --stdout ../patch-2.6.5-rc2-bk3.bz2 | patch --verbose -p1 bunzip2 --stdout ../2.6.5-rc2-bk3-libata1.patch.bz2 | patch --verbose -p1 9) configure kernel options make menuconfig - see "device drivers, SCSI device support, SCSI low level drivers" 10) build kernel make make modules_install make install 11) Stuff around with BIOS settings some more. The stock kernel needed failsafe settings. Enable everything esp. the SATA controller! 12) Stuff around with kernel parms in grub - acpi=off noapic nolapic 13) check boot dmesg ... libata version 1.02 loaded. ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xA800 ctl 0xAC02 bmdma 0xB800 irq 11 ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xB000 ctl 0xB402 bmdma 0xB808 irq 11 ata1: dev 0 cfg 49:2f00 82:7c6b 83:7b09 84:4003 85:7c69 86:3a01 87:4003 88:407f ata1: dev 0 ATA, max UDMA/133, 240121728 sectors ata1: dev 0 configured for UDMA/133 scsi0 : sata_sis ata2: dev 0 cfg 49:2f00 82:7c6b 83:7b09 84:4003 85:7c69 86:3a01 87:4003 88:407f ata2: dev 0 ATA, max UDMA/133, 240121728 sectors ata2: dev 0 configured for UDMA/133 scsi1 : sata_sis Vendor: ATA Model: Maxtor 6Y120M0 Rev: 1.02 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05 Vendor: ATA Model: Maxtor 6Y120M0 Rev: 1.02 Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 05 SCSI device sda: 240121728 512-byte hdwr sectors (122942 MB) SCSI device sda: drive cache: write through sda: unknown partition table Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 SCSI device sdb: 240121728 512-byte hdwr sectors (122942 MB) SCSI device sdb: drive cache: write through sdb: Attached scsi disk sdb at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 ... 14) go and buy another ide drive! My system will be used for digital video editing. I've come around to like the idea of an OS disk, butI want to mirror it! 15) Thank those who domate their time to Linux. Thanks one and all! If I had to go windows my costs would have more than doubled and I wouldn't have learnt anything about kernels and devices. Benno

- Being rather new (green) to Linux, I assumed that SATA and RAID would not be a problem under 10.0... My motherboard has a SiS RAID controller, which isn't currently supported in the Kernel, with patching it might work. I found this document which I think is quite helpful: http://www.linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html It would appear that alot of installers won't work with SATA (none in my case) - re kernel in the installer. program. I think the simplist way to get up and running on a newer system with SATA is to cheat, use an IDE drive. BTW: I also found that alot of linux installers wouldn't work or would lock up, they seemed to get confused when probing hardware. I post when I get it working, if you don't hear from me again. It means I gave up and installed windows! Cheers Benno